Category: Weblogging

Categories
Political Weblogging

Amongst the peace bloggers

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I found an excellent essay, Vietnam War Retrospective that discusses photojournalism’s effects on the Vietnam protest movement. Among some of the events recalled by the author, Frank Cossa, is the following:

We saw a callow, fair young man slip a flower into the rifle barrel of a helmeted MP standing guard in front of the Pentagon; a literal demonstration of “flower power” in a gesture of perfect absurdist grace. (We never did see the Pentagon “levitate” as the Yippies promised it would on that occasion, but some of us are convinced that it gave a slight shimmy).

I remember these images very well — flower children, eyes glazed by love and peace (and liberal doses of grass), gently putting daisies and carnations into the rifles of very young guardsmen, most of whom hadn’t a clue how to respond to such action. The image was very powerful, and an effective companion to other photojournalist efforts that showed dead Vietnamese children and women and dead American soldiers as well as injured or dead protestors.

After all, without love, what were we fighting for?

Peace Bloggers speak out:

AKMA – BTW, thanks for trying in Doc’s comments, Rev

Jonathon – who really shouldn’t eat sardines and vegemite, followed by lamb and potatoes when sick

Eric – Off to jury duty next week, poor boy

Chris – My favorite chicken who clucks most elegantly

Kath – Who suggests we should send the current Middle East leaders to Pluto

Mike Golby who introduces us to a new South African, Nithia Govender as both discuss the choice South Africa made for peace. Gives hope.

Elaine – who has taken to peace blogging most passionately

Steve who, like Jonathon, specializes in the delicately subtle as compared to the clamorously loud (the latter being my own particular approach).

Rogi — who pointed out this interesting new bug that really looks like a bug and gets 1 litre/100 km.

And Karl – Who wrote the peace bloggers creed:

Read both sides. Get to the truth. Form your own opinions. And if you can – be courageous and speak them. But make sure you read both sides to the story. Don’t trust writers that do not declare their biases.

Don’t add to the data smog people – help cut thru it.

Categories
Weblogging

Shattered Webs

Shattered Webs


Points meet and swirl in an eddy of communication and reach, growing into a circle so large that light must surely shine from its depths…

…until the darkness of the surround intrudes and the circle spins more slowly

…and falters

…and breaks

Splintering into bits and pieces of shattered web, gossamer fine, edges dulled by wit

—

And Mike writes:

“On 8 April, the Israeli army allowed a single ambulance access to the camp for the first time in 10 days. However, as the ambulance evacuated three badly injured people from inside the camp, Israeli troops held up the ambulance and violently snatched two of the injured, claiming they were terrorists and were under arrest.”

And AKMA writes:

“No one should be subject to the fear of sudden violent death; no one should be subject to the fear that tanks will flatten his or her home. And so far as I can tell, no one advances the cause of peace by killing more people. Killing more people advances the causes of hatred (suppressed or overt) and vengeance, and killing more people will only cost a steadily increasing number of lives.”

And Elaine writes:

“Killing innocent people is wrong. It’s wrong for the Palestinians and it’s wrong for the Israelis. But if neither side doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of warring on their neighbors, then they should simply stop making war and resolve to negotiate.”

And Meryl writes as she and Mike Sanders join in March:

“We want peace, too. But not at the cost of the State of Israel, or by more loss of Jewish lives.”

And Jonathon writes:

“All around Beckett senseless arrests and killings were commonplace. Even more devastating was the knowledge that numerous friends were either colloborating openly with the Germans or indirectly toadying to them. He found himself unable to remain neutral any longer. Now that the war touched his friends, it was no longer a philosophical exercise — it had become grimly personal.”

And Chris Writes:

“Bathe in the blood of your enemies, before they have a chance to caper like children in arterial gouts of yours. Cleanse the world of your hated foes, yes, that’s it, ethnically cleanse.”

Splintering into bits and pieces of shattered web, gossamer fine, edges dulled by wit

Categories
Weblogging

My weblog has fallen down and it can’t get up!

A weblogger’s nightmare:

I am looking at a weblog page with a Google box to the right and a NY Times box to the left and several buttons with coffee mugs all over them that generate OPML, RSS, and various other assorted and sundry XML flavors. Within the page there is this outline with links and plus signs and you click on the plus signs and the content is expanded to show even more outlines, which can expand to even more outlines, and on and on and on.

And I see myself hunting desperately through the page knowing if I look hard enough, deep enough, I will find the truth. I will find what the weblogger has to say.

Finally, after I click enough of the little plus signs, and get rid of all these boxes that keep opening up and tell Google to shut the fuck up for just one second, I find it.

Hear the words of The Weblogger:

You are The Doc Searls Weblog!

You are located at http://doc.weblogs.com/

You are rather jolly. You write a lot of geeky stuff. You are so fond of penguins that you edit a journal about them.

At which point my head implodes from one mind bomb too many, and the weblog falls over and the Internet gets sucked up into this huge black hole and the universe as we know it ceases to exist.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Google API and Weblogging

I just can’t see any usefulness of the Google API for weblogging.

So you can use it for lookups. To lookup what? We’ve all seem how useful Google lookups are. I still get hits for add morpheus node. And this buys me…what?

Weblogs aren’t “resources”. People use Google to find “resources”. Google lookups work extremely well for persistent resources such as tutorials for CSS or articles on the Giant Squid or such (as I get for my other web sites). They don’t work especially well for weblogs unless the weblog is created for a specific purpose and to be a resource.

Most of us just want to have fun…

The only accurate Google lookups I’ve had are for “burningbird”, “shelley powers”, and “single childless women in their 40’s do any of them feel positive about their situation”. And why would I want to put this as an embedded web services call within my weblog page? I would assume that people could use these phrases in Google to get to my page — they wouldn’t need to use it once they’re at my page.

Embedding a Google SOAP call into my weblog page is only going to add more CPU use every time the page is loaded as well as slow access to the page itself as it waits for the SOAP call to finish processing at Google. If I want to slow up page loading, I can easily add another photograph. I bet my friends who access my weblog via modem would just love me to add yet more bandwidth hogging content.

If I wanted to add searching capability within my weblog, the easiest, most efficient thing for me to do would be just embed a link to Google and attach the phrase to the URL. Then if people want to read more about me, they can, without penalty to the rest.

I am a technologist. I love technology. But there’s nothing that irritates me more than the use of Technology just to use it. Tinkering — that’s cool, and a great learning exercise. Talking about technology because you think it’s neat, or fun, or because it’s something you love, or you use technology in your job — that’s cool, too. Go for it! Have fun! Thanks for sharing! But to get caught up in technology because someone has convinced you that it’s the “geek” thing to do or because you want to get mentioned at Scripting News — phhhut!

I have to ask you all something, what’s more important to you: that you get hits or that people come to your weblog to read what you have to say.

I keep hearing from you all that you’re really only concerned about attracting readers who come to the weblog to read what you say. Yet we’re inundated, drowned, overwhelmed, and suffocated by all of the technological gimmicks that we absolutely must have at our weblogs or perish!

If you want people to come to your weblog and hang around for what you say, then say something interesting, unique, funny, controversial, informative, silly, cute, beautiful, smart, witty, sexy, or any of the above.

We need more sex in weblogging and less technology. There. My pronouncement for the day.

Categories
Weblogging

What kind of…

After reading about Doc Searls exploits yesterday I’m amazed that no one has invented a What kind of Doc Searls Dead Animal are you? quiz yet.